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Bestselling author, Entrepreneur and Agent of change. Seth's blog can be found at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
June 2009
Tuesday June 30, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 4:37PM EST on June 30, 2009
I've never written those three words before, but he's never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go. Free is the name of Chris's new book, and it's going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about. The first...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:41AM EST on June 30, 2009
This is one of the great cultural touchstone slogans of our era. A culture where there's so much to eat we need to try to find a food that we can eat even if we're stuffed. Often, we'll decide that...
Monday June 29, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:05AM EST on June 29, 2009
For fifteen years, I was a book packager. It has nothing to do with packaging and a bit more to do with books, but it's a great gig and there are useful lessons, because there are dozens of industries just...
Sunday June 28, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:11AM EST on June 28, 2009
The middle of the market is the juicy part, where profit meets scale. The paradox is that it's almost impossible to make a product or service for this segment, because they want the tried, the true and the boring. A...
Saturday June 27, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:46AM EST on June 27, 2009
Mark points us to this study of fads and trends. It turns out that a fast-growing trend is also likely to become a fast-fading trend. My analysis: the people who jump on a fast-moving trend are fickle early adopters. This...
Friday June 26, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 12:48PM EST on June 26, 2009
I think it can. It did for me. I went to the best summer camp in the world (the pictures to the right are by the now-famous but then teenaged Jill Greenberg). Most of what I know, I learned there....
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:12AM EST on June 26, 2009
Strangers are justifiably suspicious. Friends give you the benefit of the doubt. “Friend” is more broadly defined as someone you have a beer with or meet up with to go on a hike. A friend is someone who has interacted...
Thursday June 25, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:32AM EST on June 25, 2009
There's always a gap between the short-term results of a well-polished system and the first results of a switch to a more efficient one. If you stick with that thing you've worked so hard to perfect, the next few hours...
Wednesday June 24, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:27PM EST on June 24, 2009
Does everything have to become completely transparent? One of the ideas du jour online is the rush to make things transparent. To tear down the barriers and raise the blinds on the way organizations do business and to expose as...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:21AM EST on June 24, 2009
Marketing (in all its forms) is unlike everything else an organization does, because it's always different. There's no manual because everyone does it differently, and what successful marketers have in common is that they are successful. The only way your...
Tuesday June 23, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:38AM EST on June 23, 2009
At one point, the Singer Corporation had more than 12,000 people working in a single plant. They were selling more than a million sewing machines a year and had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. By any measure, it...
Monday June 22, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:08AM EST on June 22, 2009
Clay taught me a good lesson about making things happen with your brand. Envision the events that might happen to a brand (shelf space at Walmart, an appearance on Oprah, a bestseller, worldwide recognition, a new edition, worldwide rights, chosen...
Sunday June 21, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:00AM EST on June 21, 2009
Justine plays a game that involves finding yellow cars on the road and shouting the appropriate term as you see them. What you discover after just a few minutes is just how many yellow cars there are. A lot. We...
Saturday June 20, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:05AM EST on June 20, 2009
Along the way, we settle. We settle for something not quite right, or an outfit that isn't our best look, or a job that doesn't quite maximize our talents. We settle for relationships that don't give us joy, or a...
Friday June 19, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 2:22PM EST on June 19, 2009
The Olympics Kumba Mela Times Square on midnight Burning Man TED The Super Bowl Calcio Storico Warren Buffet's annual meeting The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Your birthday People love them. We generally agree we don't have them often enough. What...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:01AM EST on June 19, 2009
You can be a trusted institution or a trusted individual. A few weeks ago, I set out to buy some imprinted items. I probably looked at a dozen t-shirt options online before I picked CustomInk. Why did I pick them?...
Thursday June 18, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:14AM EST on June 18, 2009
Allan points out that Warren Buffet and Benjamin Graham invested in Circles of Competence. The idea is to buy what you know. Too often, organizations confuse this with circles of convenience. They stick to the tactics, products, people and channels...
Wednesday June 17, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:18AM EST on June 17, 2009
Dave Balter coined this great term. It describes the quest of marketers for size at all costs. Because marketers were raised on the scale of mass—TV, radio, newspapers—they have a churn and burn mentality. The internet turns this upside down....
Tuesday June 16, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:55AM EST on June 16, 2009
No project is conceived in a vacuum, no decision in isolation and no negotiation with a clean sheet of paper. But do you know what you're not willing to consider? If a newspaper company is planning its future, is shutting...
Monday June 15, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:52AM EST on June 15, 2009
When you love the work you do and the people you do it with, you matter. When you are so gracious and generous and aware that you think of other people before yourself, you matter. When you leave the world...
Sunday June 14, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:03AM EST on June 14, 2009
I've spent the last few months looking at marketing textbooks. I'm assuming that they are fairly representative of textbooks in general, and since this is a topic I'm interested in, it seemed like a good area to focus on. As...
Saturday June 13, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:58AM EST on June 13, 2009
If you could make one thing come true that would change everything for your project, do you know what the one thing would be? One breakthrough client, one technical advance, one testimonial? One achievable change in the world? For Google,...
Friday June 12, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:20AM EST on June 12, 2009
If you own a lot of acres but just have a few bags of seed, you might be tempted to spread out what you've got and cover as much territory as you can. Farmers tell me that this is wasteful...
Thursday June 11, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 11:20AM EST on June 11, 2009
Hugh MacLeod's new book on creativity is out today. It's brilliant, and if you're willing to be pushed, it will push you. Some people avoid Hugh's work because he's unafraid (even eager) to write about sex and to use language...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:24AM EST on June 11, 2009
I'm not talking about annual reviews (which are stupid). I'm talking about how you work as a client for a project that needs to make something. It might be an internal team developing a website or it might be an...
Wednesday June 10, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:03AM EST on June 10, 2009
Paul just sent over this video of a dance tribe forming spontaneously at a music festival. My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That's when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 4:16AM EST on June 10, 2009
I got some fascinating responses to yesterday's post. A few were from entitled college grads. They basically asked, "With all this debt, how can I possibly do what you asked? Sure, some people might be able to do this, but...
Tuesday June 9, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 4:57AM EST on June 9, 2009
Fewer college grads have jobs than at any other time in recent memory—a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers annual student survey said that 20 percent of 2009 college graduates who applied for a job actually have...
Monday June 8, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:22AM EST on June 8, 2009
This is a simple mantra that is going to change the way you attend every meeting and every conference for the rest of your life. You probably don't have to be there. No gun held to your head, after all....
Sunday June 7, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:59AM EST on June 7, 2009
When you start a business, a brand or a project, there's a lot of work to be done. You must tell a story, build credibility and a permission asset. People don't trust you or believe you and you must earn...
Saturday June 6, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:15AM EST on June 6, 2009
Sorry, someone had to say it. Your products are predictable. Your insights are recycled. You don't bring surprise with you when you enter a room. That's why people are ignoring you. Which used to be fine, because you could just...
Friday June 5, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:47AM EST on June 5, 2009
If you're in a meeting with smart people and they start discussing a term or concept you don't understand, what do you do? Do you know what recombinant DNA is? Analytics? Chapter 7? Fair use? RSS? The Long Tail? If...
Thursday June 4, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 11:04AM EST on June 4, 2009
In November, I posted about an alternative MBA program that I was going to launch. Unaccredited, residential, free and six months long. A new way to learn about a new way of doing business. We're almost done, and it has...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:23AM EST on June 4, 2009
Sometimes people push back on posts of mine they don't like by telling me I'm out of bounds. Somehow, they say, I've crossed the boundary of what I'm allowed to write about. They are angry that I'm now writing about...
Wednesday June 3, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:19AM EST on June 3, 2009
If you sell crack to kindergarten students, no need to read this. Same thing if you donate all your belongings and income to the poorest and sickest in the slums and ghettos. The rest of us have compromised. We're not...
Tuesday June 2, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:41AM EST on June 2, 2009
There are two reasons joint ventures fail. The joint part and the venture part. All ventures are risky, because they involve change and the unknown. We set off on a venture in search of something, or to make something happen--inherent...
Monday June 1, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:47AM EST on June 1, 2009
I was just informed by the resident baseball fan that the Mets won a game by a walk. By a walk! Of course, in a 4 to 3 baseball game, you don't win by a walk. You win because before...
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